What Lies Between Us(38)

I’m suddenly struck by Jon’s absence. ‘Have you heard from Jon?’

‘No, I’m sorry, I haven’t,’ she replies.

‘But you promised you were going to see him and tell him what happened.’ My words slur as I fight to release them.

‘I promise you I saw him, but he wasn’t interested in coming to visit. I’m so sorry, my darling.’

I start to cry again.



A few days later, Mum helps me out of bed and leads me into the garden. The warmth of the sun reaches my face as she walks with me, her arm wrapped around my waist for support. She leads me along the path until we reach the far end, past the crab-apple trees and close to the shed. In front of me is a flower bed. It’s full of brightly coloured plants and a small rose bush has been planted in the centre. It has one yellow bloom.

‘Why don’t we sit down?’ she suggests, and I do. I allow the palms of my hands and fingertips to run across the soft blades of grass. For a moment, I feel alive again. However, it’s fleeting.

‘And she’s here?’ I ask, gazing at the plants.

Mum nods. ‘I chose somewhere secluded where you could come and sit and talk to her where nobody else can see.’

I consider how hard it must have been for Mum to deliver her granddaughter, then hold her lifeless body in her arms. She never talks about what my faulty chromosomes did to Dylan’s appearance, but I have no doubt that it can’t have been easy for her to see. ‘What did you bury her in?’ I ask.

‘I put her in an old Babygro of yours that I’d kept and I wrapped her in that patchwork quilt that Elsie made for you when you were a baby to keep her warm. And then I washed a box I found in the shed and carefully tucked her up inside it.’

Dylan. My Dylan. I let the earth she is buried under run through my fingers and scatter.

As the medication begins to wear off, I understand that it’s always going to be like this. Everyone I have loved or will ever love is going to leave me. Dad. Jon. My daughter. I’m never going to carry a healthy child or settle down and start a family because no man will ever want someone as broken as me. Jon didn’t, so why should anyone else be different? The only constant I’ll ever have is Mum and even she won’t be around forever. At least while she’s here, she will always put me first. She will never let me down.

Without warning, it all becomes too much for me. I look at Mum and instinctively, she knows what to do. She helps me to my feet, escorts me inside and upstairs to my bedroom and offers me another couple of tablets.

I think I’m beginning to prefer the blur because it hurts less.





CHAPTER 31





NINA


The kitchen is rich with the sweet aroma of a chocolate cake I’m baking. I’ve blended the flour, eggs, sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt together with a wooden spoon and good old-fashioned elbow grease, just like Dad used to do. Now the two halves are cooling down on a wire rack on the worktop.

I can’t resist scooping what’s left in the bowl with my finger to taste before I begin the washing up. I haven’t eaten much in the last few days since the dentist removed the root and shards of the tooth Maggie broke. The swelling has gone down but there’s still bruising.

I’ve been thinking about Dad a lot this week, and being in the kitchen makes a childhood memory of him surge to the surface. I’m standing by his side with a red tea towel in my hand and he’s passing me wet dishes to dry. I can’t be more than ten years old and we are singing along to ABBA’s greatest hits album playing on the hi-fi in the lounge next door. Every weekend, Dad made us either a cake or a loaf of bread from scratch, and I’d help.

Now, when I’m baking, which admittedly isn’t that often these days, I imagine that I’m standing where I am right now, in front of the sink, and my child is next to me, every bit the willing helper as I was. I can see Dylan in the reflection of the window and I find myself explaining aloud which ingredients need to go into the bowl first and why, and that we have to be patient while the cake bakes and not keep opening the oven door to check on it. When I blink, she vanishes.

I remember very little after Mum carried Dylan away from me. I know that I shut down and for almost a year, I disassociated myself from everyone. Shortly before my sixteenth birthday, Mum helped wean me off the antidepressants and I made my slow return to the world. But it soon became apparent that I was no longer fitted for the life I once had. I couldn’t slip into the same routine, same cliques or the same school. I had suffered too much loss to be that girl again. So I had to become someone else.

Maggie began working three jobs to pay for a private tutor to get me up to speed. And after a year of effort, I scraped through my exams with seven GCSEs. It was enough to get me to Northampton College to study for A-levels in English literature and English language.

For the sake of my sanity, I’d pushed Jon out of my mind. I no longer listened to music – his or anyone else’s. I didn’t go into town, I didn’t keep my old friends or read magazines or newspapers. I stopped doing anything that reminded me of the life that had ended so painfully. It didn’t stop me from worrying that I might just bump into Jon one day in the street. However, I was sure he was some big globetrotting rock star by now and had left this small town way behind him.

It was a new friend I made at college who shattered that illusion.